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ART STUDENTS LEAGUE OF NY       RR84
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[[caption]] Photo Zindman/Fremont, Courtesy, The Leo Castelli Gallery
[[caption]] Robert Rauschenberg: Stylite II 1982
High fired ceramic 27 1/2 x 27 1/2 "

Robert Rauschenberg
Robert Rauschenberg was still a student at the Art Students League in 1951 when he had his first one man show at the Betty Parsons Gallery. However it was his next show in 1953, at the Stable Gallery which really established him as the enfant terrible of New York's art world. (One well-known art critic was ovserved reeling out of the gallery clutching his forehead. Another lambasted him in her column and added additional derogatroy comment in her summing up of the year's art events in a feature at the end of the year.)
Long before the term Pop Art was ever invented, Rauschenberg was being hailed as one of the leaders of what was then being referred to as the New Realism. Combine-paintings, a term invented by Rauschenberg to describe his own works, comprise elements from painting, sculpture and ready-made and found objects-- that is, real things of everyday use, also strange things found by him in junk and antique shops. Works such as these exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Whitney Museum established his reputation which grew steadily as the years went by. In the summer of 1964 he won the top award at the XXXII Venice Biennale-- only the third American to receive this honor-- the other two being James McNeill Whistler and Mark Tobey. (Another former League student, Alexander Calder, won a gold medal in sculpture.) Also in 1964 Rauschenberg's retrospective exhibition at the Whitecapel Gallery in London attracted all-time record crowds so that the gallery had to hire extra guards in order to cope with them.
In 1965 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited Rauschenberg's 34 drawings for Dante's Inferno in which he used an iconography drawn from contemporary life. In these drawings he featured an original technique permitting the transfer of images from newspapers and magazines without the use of collage. These drawings were soon being known as combine-drawings.
In 1968 Rauschenberg who in earlier years often had difficulty keeping body and soul together, founded Change, Inc. to which well-established artists could make contributions in order to assist artists still struggling along the road to success and recognition. 
In addition to his activities as painter, printmaker and draughtsman, Rauschenberg has been a choreographer of modern dance. He was born in Port Arthur, Texas, in 1925. He studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and as a G.I. Bill student at the Julian Academy in Paris and with Joseph Albers at Black Mountain College before coming to the Art Students League where he was a student for about three years. His instructors at the League were Vaclav Vytlacil, MOrris Kantor, Byron Browne and Charles H. Alston. He is an Honorary Member of the League. Since 1958 he has been represented by the Leo Castelli Gallery.

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